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Thursday, February 26, 2009

I was reading a book and came across stats on hate crimes in the United States, and began thinking about the various signifiers we consider protected under hate crime legislation. It led me to this thought:

Why isn't violence against women on the basis of their gender considered a hate crime?*

I don't necessarily have an answer to this and I'm not sure where I stand on the issue. However, gender (along with race, sexual orientation, disability, etc) is protected under the equal protection clause, so it's notable that it's not included. Protecting gender under hate crimes laws would change how street harassment, sexual violence and rape cases are viewed, in my opinion.

I can certainly think of many acts of violence done specifically against women and girls because they are women and girls.

Why isn't violence against women a hate crime? Because it's the basis of our mainstream, pornogrified culture. Because males love it. Because females are raised to groove on it. Because males and their minions make the laws.

I should have been more clear in my original post. I'm talking about violence against women done specifically because the person is a woman. If you notice, the links I provided were to specific examples of violence against women because they were women (shootings of the Amish girls, incidents of throwing acid on schoolgirls in Afghanistan).

In hate crimes now, prosecutors have to prove that the crime was committed because of bias against race, sexual orientation, etc. It would be no different for gender.

I don't think all violence against women would fall under hate crimes (although one could argue that American society teaches us that women are less-than and all violence against women is a form of a hate crime - I'm not 100% buying this argument, though). However, there is some violence done specifically because the victims are women, and that should be protected under hate crimes.

The whole concept of a hate crime is completely flawed. If I, say, kill someone because of their race, then I should be prosecuted and punished according to my actions, not my thoughts. So what if you harm someone because of their race/gender/sexual orientation or simply because they were there at the time? It shouldn't matter, unless you want to make thinking nasty thoughts a crime as well.

Actually, I am against the use of "hate crime" terminology and implementation in judicial cases. Most violent crime is committed out of hate. To brand certain brands of our own savagery against some but not all would simply cheapen the plight of everyone who's case was deemed not a "hate crime".

My main beef with the question posed is, would attacking a man on the basis of his gender also be a hate crime? In the purest sense of the term, yes, but since society is dominated by an overbearing patriarchal system of control, does that justify increased hostile prosecution of a man's assailant based on grounds that it was an act of bigotry?

Are minority groups and the disenfranchised capable of being bigots, too? Or only those traits perceived as culturally dominant, whites, men, Christians...

I do not see it this way. If we wish for a society that executes equality among all peoples, we must first realize that we are all equal in our capacity to harm, to offend, and to commit acts of bigotry. Any minority status does not exempt us from this.